How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (Part Two)

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to part two of my post on how to succeed in your job by means not necessarily part of conventional wisdom. In part one, I yammered on and on and on about discussed the following things almost anyone can pretty easily do that’ll increase your likelihood of success in the workplace: (1) have a base knowledge about how to do your job; (2) show up to work; (3) be nice; (4) aim for some chuckles every once in a while; and (5) be on the lookout for opportunities to offer new—even if staggeringly simple—solutions.

I know, I know. The cliffhanger I left you with in part one has left you on the edge of your seat ever since reading it. I get it. Not to brag, but several Hollywood directors have me on speed-dial. What’s that? Which Hollywood directors exactly, you ask? Well, I can’t divulge that, Dear Reader.

Anyway, let’s get to the excitement, shall we?

Common ground

I’ve almost never worked with someone with whom I seemed to share nothing in common. In most cases, I’ve shared at least a few things in common with people I’ve worked with/for: same gender, same cultural background, same religion, same hometown, same degree of love of the same nerdy subject, same love of gummy bears, and so on.

These bonds often have absolutely nothing to do with the job or one’s ability to do it. But lemme tell you, they’re powerful in building invisible, and sometimes deep, connections that’ll make people you work with/for like working with you. When I find someone who’s as nerdy as I am—and about the same things—I shed tears of joy. Or maybe the tears are shed because I’m pretty sure the other person has been/is teased as mercilessly as me. I dunno. The important thing is that there are tears.

So when I start working with someone, I try to identify things we have in common. Once I’ve done so, I make sure to point out those things if they’re not overly obvious.

Mind you, I do this naturally in the course of conversation. I don’t force it. I genuinely do want to find connections so we can form a better relationship. A nuance is that as I get to know the person better, I figure out which of the things we have in common the other person considers most important or that he or she likes to talk about most. And so we naturally will talk about those things, or at least we’ll each remember that we have them in common. Some of the connection points are so powerful that I’ve broken them into their own category below.

Just do it

You know what people seem to love? C’mon, guess! “The Master of Spikes tournament,” you say? Hmmm, maybe some people (and oh, I am so 100% among them).

Guess again. I’ll wait. “Personal finance blogs,” you say? Oh, I suppose maybe as to some blogs. But probably not this one.

Well, Dear Reader, good tries. But I can see I’m going to have to help you out. The answer I was looking for is: when you do something that benefits them.

Best of all, these things you do need not be difficult or even related to the job. And sometimes the mere offer to do them is good enough.

Allow me to explain.

Say you’re in the office and have a mad wicked hankering for a half-caf double-vented frappamochachino lattecano. You normally bring your own half-caf double-vented frappamochachino lattecano to work cuz you’re pursuing FIRE hard-core. But on this day, you forgot to do so. So it’s off to the half-caf double-vented frappamochachino lattecano store near the office.

But then you remember that your boss/client/colleague likes coffee. So you say to him or her “Hey, him or her. I’m going to the half-caf double-vented frappamochachino lattecano store. Would you like me to grab you a cuppa?” Him or her doesn’t just happen to be jonesing for coffee, but is both surprised and delighted you offered to get it. And so him or her says “Yes. That’d be great!” And so, you get a cuppa for him or her.

All you had to do in this situation was ask a question and spend probably all of another minute in the half-caf double-vented frappamochachino lattecano store. Wanna go the extra mile? Comp the coffee. Him or her will be even more impressed with your thoughtfulness. And there’s a good chance him or her will insist on paying you back.

If you do things like this often enough, for enough people, you’re bound to get a reputation as someone people like to work with. Even moreso if you offer to do work-related things for people. Especially, I’ve found, if those things are tedious or otherwise annoying or disliked by the person who’d otherwise have to do them.

Own goal

While you need to bring a base level of competence to your job, you’ll occasionally fail. You might even screw things up. Lord knows that I have. Many, many, many times.

This said, you probably should fail every once in a while. As Albert Einstein (who might not have known how to comb his hair, but who I think we can agree was no idiot) once said, “If you’ve never failed, you’ve never tried anything new.”

But aside from trying to make things right, and learn from the experience—which you should try to do—you must own your mistakes and let the chips fall where they may. Honesty about a failure will many, if not most, times be appreciated. People may be no happier about the bad result just because you owned up to it. In fact, they might still be furious. But they should appreciate that you were man/woman enough to admit to the mistake.

And never, ever—even if you know you can get away with it—blame other people for your mistake or failure. For starters, that’s immoral. But even if your standards of morality are not tip-top, there’s always the possibility, however remote, that your dishonesty can come back to bite you in the behind some way somehow. Hard, and without mercy. Not worth it.

Parent trap

This next item could go in the commonalities section above. But it’s important enough on its own that it deserves its own category. If you’re a parent, the bond between you and someone you work with/for who’s also a parent is almost always going to be more than skin deep.

With all due respect to people who are not parents—a cohort I was a proud member of for more than 30 years, so I know you people—I have found that parents generally have a deeper and more expansive understanding of life and how the world works than the vast majority of nonparents. At the very least we know deep in our marrow, and can discuss, what it’s like for our kid to be a knucklehead the most amazing person ever.

I know firsthand that I’m far from alone in believing this. In fact, most parents I know and have worked with share this sentiment. So when fellow parents and I talk—whether its about kids or about something completely different—there’s usually an invisible trust and bond. It might not be a strong trust and bond, but it’s usually there.

However strong that trust and bond is, however, it certainly can be broken. If you’re lousy at your job, fellow parents are going to care a heckuva lot less that you’re both parents. But it often can compensate for some measure of incompetence. In fact, I have found that, for better or worse, employers and clients are less likely to fire a parent—especially if he or she is the family’s sole breadwinner—than nonparents. Or they’re at least more likely to pause before doing so.

Training day

Here’s another commonality that deserves its own category: similar training and/or industry experience between you and someone you work with or for. I have a law degree and work with attorneys. As I mentioned in part one of this post, lawyers can be jerks.

What’s more, it’s a fair bet that if you work with attorneys and aren’t a lawyer or don’t have a law degree, the attorney will have a certain degree of a he/she-doesn’t-get-it attitude toward you. You could hold an MD and an MBA and run your own large company, and that lawyer is still gonna think that you’re at least partially, if not completely, an uneducated dolt. It’s terrible. But it’s true.

In some measure of fairness to attorneys, I’m told that holders of other professional degrees feel the same toward nonholders. And I’m pretty sure that in almost every industry, if you’re someone who’s not worked in the field, or hasn’t been in it for long, you’ll forever be considered an outsider.

Knowing this stupid state of affairs, if I get a sense that a lawyer is talking down to me or discounting what I’m saying because he or she thinks I’m not an attorney, I make sure to subtly reference that I’m a lawyer likety-split. It works every time. Again, it’s terrible. But I assure you, it’s true.

More than magically and instantly leveling the playing field, this shared training/industry experience can make you considered disproportionately valuable to those you work with or for. And unlike a lot of other commonalities, this is one that I’ve found will mask a certain amount of incompetence. Not that you shouldn’t try to do your work well. You should. Just that your fellow lawyers/doctors/industry veterans/etc. may be a lot more forgiving. To a point, of course. If you really suck at your job, or regularly screw things up, or botch something huge, you’re probably out on your behind.

OK, Dear Reader, I think that’s enough for today. This list is by no means exhaustive. There are tons of ways you can raise your stock in the workplace in simple ways that may have nothing to do with the (quality of the) work you do. Hopefully this list is helpful and gets you thinking.

Oh, and here’s a corollary to the owning up to failures for which you’re responsible—if you’re given (disproportionate) credit for a success that others did or (also) contributed to, point that out. Every time. At the very least, the people who initially didn’t get the (full) credit they were due will appreciate that you tried to correct any misunderstandings. And at best, something for which you may never have been entitled to get credit for will now be something for which you’ll be remembered positively. Here’s a cautionary tale in case you need one.